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Facebook criticised for manipulating news feeds in secret mood altering experiment

on Jun 30, 2014 | 0 comments

By John Glenday

Facebook has come under fire from protesters after it admitted to manipulating the news feeds of 689,000 users as part of a secret mood altering experiment.

The social media giant was seeking to toy with people’s emotions by filtering comments, videos, pictures and links posted by friends in order to influence whether that person felt happier or sadder – a process it dubbed ‘emotional contagion’.

This saw unwitting participants subjected to either a reduced flow of positive posts, resulting in fewer positives posts of their own, or a torrent of negative messages – which fuelled a parallel rise in self-penned negativity.

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Source: The Drum